I'M SO LONESOME I COULD DIE
Garth Brooks More Dangerous Than Ozzy Osbourne!

by
K.K. CAMPBELL

Every rutting season or three, the wife of Yanqui vice-president Al Gore
-- Tipper Gore, The First Lady of Vice -- hops on her trusty stead and
rides out to battle the Devil Music that stalks the innocent children of
Planet Earth.

You know the stuff. Zappa. Ice T. Type-O Negative.

The stuff that rots your brain, corrupts your soul, sends you screaming
into the night. In short: the Record Peddler catalogue.

Tipper and her Washington-wife cronies in the PMRC (which stands for
Parents Music Resource Commissariat) want to slap warning stickers all
over that nasty noise.

Whenever the prudes mount a censorship offensive, their favorite line
of attack is suicide. Modern music encourages suicide.
Modern music encourages kids to blow their brains all over Mom's nice,
new bathroom wallpaper.

Wellll... listen here...

Next time some Tipster-like ayatollah tries to squat her love down on
you, you ram the following report up her... attention span. This
report, called "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide", is by two
American sociologists -- Steven Stack (Wayne State) and Jim Gundlach
(Auburn).

It's a first-ever academic study comparing country music and suicide
rates. And it concludes... The greater the volume of country
airplay in a city, the higher the white suicide rate.

The danger ain't Judas Priest, Tipper -- it's Willie Nelson!

CAREFUL CAREFUL

"For our sample of 49 major U.S. cities, we found that the greater the
percentage of radio time devoted to country music, the higher the
incidence of white suicide; black suicide was unrelated to country
music," the report reads.

Stack and Gundlach, being social scientists, do not come to this
conclusion lightly. They use mathematical formulae and sexy jargonese:
significant zero-order correlations, crude variance inflation factors,
multicollinearity, ordinary-least-squares-regression-techniques. These
tools are used to determine if maybe it's just a fluke. Maybe some
other factor is causing country listeners to cash in their chips.

Country music encourages suicidal moods through its constant whining
about "booze, broads, and bosses".

MARITAL DISCORD: Research is unanimous, relationship
troubles dominate in suicide risks. A 1989 content analysis of 1,400
hit country tunes found that almost 75 per cent deal with relationship
problems.

ALCOHOL ABUSE: Alcohol has long been associated with
suicide risk. Country songs continually portrays booze as just a
natural a part of life.

While, country songs, largely fictional, are associated with listener
suicide, the study notes that TV soap operas, also fictional, and
loaded with overt suicidal activity, do not seem to encourage viewer
suicide.

What's the difference? Stack believes it comes down to "subcultures".
TV-soap-zombies, while certainly pathetic, are not connected to a true
subculture. Country listeners are.

A music subculture is defined by special values and beliefs held
commonly by members, and where members socially interact to reinforce
behavior. You change your style of dress. You befriend
fellow-listeners. You go to the same bars. Any streetwise Torontonian
can walk down Queen West and pick out a slew of subcultures -- rather
like a kid walks through the dinosaur section of the Royal Ontario
Museum, effortlessly pointing out species after species: metalhead...
goth... neo-punk... stegosaurus... deadhead... techno-dweeb...
etc.

And country forms its own subculture.

Incidentally: Even though (what them hipster sociologists call) "rock"
mentions suicide far, far more often than country, there's no
evidence "rock" encourages suicide. Quite the opposite, the
Journal of Popular Culture wrote in 1990. What little survey
research exists indicates "rock" elicits feelings of euphoria, of
"happiness, delight, and love."

Country music has left its Southern cradle and is gaining popularity
with even northern middle class audiences, according to Richard
Peterson. Peterson presented a report entitled "Changing Class
Consciousness in Country Music Lyrics" to a 1991 meeting of American
Sociological Association.

It may indeed have been hatched in the white, rural-poor backwaters of
the American South -- white man's blues -- but them days are gone.
Country is spreading cross the continent.

So don't you be trying to pass the country-suicide-craze off on some
stereo-typical image of the drawling Southern hick. The facts are in:
wherever country music goes, the white self-snuff rate rises.

Blacks generally don't listen to country. Smart move.

American whites have a suicide rate double that of blacks, and that has
long puzzled sociologists. They've spent years wracking their brains,
seeking the answer. But maybe, as with most of life's great mysteries,
the answer is simple: just flip to country-music CISS-FM, 92.5, and
find out.